Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for production management in a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) according to claims as well as a system for carrying out the method.
Over the last years the trend towards outsourcing and globalization in the automotive and other industries led to increasingly distributed production processes. These processes often rely on long and complex logistics networks involving a large number of companies geographically spread around the world. The increasing complexity of the processes leads to error-proneness and consequently uncertainties about the timely arrival of vendor goods at production facilities. The uncertainties can be reduced by real-time monitoring and recording the shipment of goods along the supply chains. Such tracking & tracing systems are facilitated by recent advances in RFID and other Auto-ID technologies. As logistic processes usually involve several companies common data standards are required. The EPC Network with its EPCIS specification (EPC Information Services (EPCIS) Version 1.0.1 Specification Source: http://www.epcglobalinc.org; http://www.gs1.org/gsmp/kc/epcglobal/epcis) is widely used for tracking & tracing applications and can be seen as a de facto standard.
The collected tracking & tracing data can be used to analyze the material flow and determine crucial deviation from the planned processes. According to Pfohl et al. (2008) three main classes of risks can be distinguished:    i) sourcing logistics and supply risks (e.g. early/late delivery of vendor parts),    ii) distribution logistics and demand risks (e.g. change of production deadlines), and    iii) process and control risks (e.g. quality violations or machine faults within own production process).
Once such disruptions are detected, the involved companies have to decide how to cope with them. For example, late arrival of input materials may require re-sequencing jobs within a production line—particularly in case of Just-in-Time (JIT) and Just-In-Sequence (JIS) settings. As many of these disruptions become known at short notice, production plans have already been fixed and dispatched to the production systems. If changes at this stage have to be implemented, detailed knowledge about the manufacturing process and current status of production is required. As such detailed operations knowledge is available only up to the manufacturing execution layer (e.g. as defined in ISA-95 (ANSI/ISA-95.00.01-2000 Enterprise-Control System Integration Part 1: Models and Terminology)/IEC 62264 (IEC 62264-1 Enterprise-control system integration—Part 1: Models and terminology)), current approaches to disruption management on a higher level of enterprise IT are ill-suited to cope with many types of short-term interferences.
One of the central challenges is how inter-organizational tracking & tracing information can be leveraged for efficient production planning and control. Realizing such systems requires exchanging tracking & tracing information horizontally between different companies and vertically between the different levels of enterprise IT from shop floor to ERP/SCM. Today RFID based solutions are predominantly deployed in the area of production logistics within a single company. Such vertical RFID data integration is realized using RFID middleware. Applied in an inter-organizational setting RFID may improve speed, accuracy, and transparency of information provisioning along the supply chain. As standardization is essential in an inter-organizational environment, EPCIS (EPCglobal, 2007) gained much attention.
However the current version of EPCIS is not sufficient for effective disruption management. What is aimed is a minimal set of extensions in order to be as standard compliant as possible.